Who scores only 36 points in a half against the Knicks? Who makes only 14 baskets in the final 24 minutes against a Mike D'Antoni-coached defense?

If you didn't know that the Nets had made a coaching change a week ago, you'd have sworn they were still being coached by Lawrence Frank.

"They're running all the same stuff," Harrington said.

It's time for Vandeweghe to have his new right-hand man, Del Harris, draw up a few plays for when the Nets face a zone defense in the future. When the Knicks went to the zone after halftime, the Nets went dead.

"With our zone offense, we were just trying to catch it on the fly," said the Nets' Chris Douglas-Roberts. "That's what happened. We were a little confused."

That had to be a first, a team "confused" by what the Knicks threw at them.

Vandeweghe called his first loss, but not his last, "a learning lesson."

While his players need to learn a thing or two about exposing a zone's holes - something an NBA team usually does, no problem - Vandeweghe is going to do his own learning over the final 62 games.

In that way, he's similar to another front-office man who was once called upon to coach his team. Like Vandeweghe, Kevin Pritchard was also asked to move from the front office and take over a Portland team that was losing and trying to turn things around.

Before being confronted with the latest catastrophic injury to Greg Oden, who went down Saturday night with a season-ending knee injury, Pritchard equated his move in 2004-05 to Vandeweghe.

"There's a parallel," he said the other day from Portland, recalling the season he took over for Maurice Cheeks. "I didn't plan to coach the team. It's hard, not easy. And I had coached a couple of seasons in Kansas City (of the ABA)."

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Vandeweghe hadn't coached a game, at any level, when he took over Friday as the Nets broke their league-record 18-game losing streak. His coaching had been limited to running some of Don Nelson's practices in Dallas several years ago.

"It's not something you wish on anyone," said Pritchard, whose team is in the Garden Monday night. "But I saw that getting under the hood of the team, by coaching, would give me a better understanding of what we had and would allow us to make better decisions for the future."

The Oden draft should have taken them to the next level, but now it looks like another Sam Bowie selection. There's nothing Blazers fans can do about that now, except to wonder what would have happened if the team had selected Kevin Durant with the No. 1 overall pick in 2007.

New Jersey is markedly different than Portland was five years ago. They've got a couple of young keepers, including Devin Harris and Brook Lopez, who combined for only nine points after halftime.

"The thing this is going to allow me to do is really get to know my younger players," Vandeweghe said. "That was a big reason for doing this. And I'll get to see all the opposing teams and their players, but on a different level. And that's big because we will be players in the free agent market this summer."

In the meantime, he'll have to get his team righted. Right now, opponents see the Nets and put a "W" in the standings before the ball is even thrown up.

"This is a game we're supposed to win," Harrington said. "The biggest thing I was saying to the guys at halftime was, we can't lose to the Nets. No disrespect, but if we want to start taking steps forward and go in the right direction, then we've got to win games versus teams like the Nets."